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The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists

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The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists


The Nazis hated socialists. It was the governments that rebuilt Europe 
that embraced social welfare programs.
Perspective by Ronald J. Granieri

Ronald J. Granieri is a Templeton Education Fellow at the Foreign Policy 
Research Institute and history professor at the U.S. Army War College. The 
views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the 
official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of 
Defense or the U.S. Government.
February 5, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Nazi soldiers salute as Adolf Hitler leads his staff down the aisle during 
the opening of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party Convention in 
Nuremberg, Germany, on Sept. 11, 1933. (AP)
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Did you know that “Nazi” is short for “National Socialist”? That means 
that Hitler and his henchmen were all socialists. Bernie Sanders calls 
himself a socialist, too. That means Bernie Sanders and his supporters are 
the same as Nazis … doesn’t it?

Anyone who has been on political Twitter in the past decade has seen a 
version of this syllogism. Conservatives, seeking to escape the “fascist” 
and “Nazi” labels tossed at them by leftist critics since the 1960s, have 
turned the tables. Books such as Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” have 
noted that many leading fascists, such as Italian dictator Benito 
Mussolini, started out as socialists, just as many early 20th-century 
“progressives” embraced eugenic ideas ultimately linked to Nazi racist 
genocide. This connection has become a silver bullet for voices on the 
right like Dinesh D’Souza and Candace Owens: Not only is the reviled left, 
embodied in 2020 by figures like Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 
Elizabeth Warren, a dangerous descendant of the Nazis, but anyone who 
opposes it can’t possibly have ties to the Nazis’ odious ideas.

There is only one problem: This argument is untrue. Although the Nazis did 
pursue a level of government intervention in the economy that would shock 
doctrinaire free marketeers, their “socialism” was at best a secondary 
element in their appeal. Indeed, most supporters of Nazism embraced the 
party precisely because they saw it as an enemy of and an alternative to 
the political left. A closer look at the connection between Nazism and 
socialism can help us better understand both ideologies in their 
historical contexts and their significance for contemporary politics.
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The Nazi regime had little to do with socialism, despite it being 
prominently included in the name of the National Socialist German 
Workers’ Party. The NSDAP, from Hitler on down, struggled with the 
political implications of having socialism in the party name. Some early 
Nazi leaders, such as Gregor and Otto Strasser, appealed to working-class 
resentments, hoping to wean German workers away from their attachment to 
existing socialist and communist parties. The NSDAP’s 1920 party program, 
the 25 points, included passages denouncing banks, department stores and 
“interest slavery,” which suggested a quasi-Marxist rejection of free 
markets. But these were also typical criticisms in the anti-Semitic 
playbook, which provided a clue that the party’s overriding ideological 
goal wasn’t a fundamental challenge to private property.

Instead of controlling the means of production or redistributing wealth to 
build a utopian society, the Nazis focused on safeguarding a social and 
racial hierarchy. They promised solidarity for members of the 
Volksgemeinschaft (“racial community”) even as they denied rights to those 
outside the charmed circle.

Additionally, while the Nazis tried to appeal to voters across the 
spectrum, the party’s founders and initial base were small-business men 
and artisans, not the industrial proletariat of Marxist lore. Their first 
notable electoral successes were in small towns and Protestant rural areas 
in present-day Thuringia and Saxony, among voters suspicious of 
cosmopolitan, secular cities who associated both “socialism” and 
“capitalism” with Jews and foreigners.
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This fear of social revolution and a sense that democracy, with its 
cacophony of voices and the need for compromises, would threaten their 
preferred social hierarchy gave Nazism its appeal with these voters — even 
if it meant sacrificing democracy. While Communists abetted the 
destruction of German democracy, seeing it as a way to eventually produce 
the revolution they wanted, the only German political party that 
consistently resisted Nazi arguments, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), 
offered another sign of the discontinuity between socialism and Nazism.

Those outside Germany who embraced Nazi ideas were also generally anti-
leftists. When Frenchmen murmured “Better Hitler than [Socialist Party 
Leader and Prime Minister Léon] Blum,” they were well aware what National 
Socialism represented, and it was most emphatically not “socialism.” When 
many of those same Frenchmen set up the puppet Vichy government in 1940, 
they did so under the banner of “Travail, famille, patrie,” (Work, family 
fatherland), happy to use state resources to support their idea of 
authentic Frenchmen — even as they criticized capitalism for providing 
benefits to people they didn’t view as French.

Unlike much of the European left, many conservatives proved willing to 
work with Nazis — something they later regretted — an association that 
tainted postwar European conservatism. When it came time to rebuild 
European politics after the war, therefore, it fell to center-left parties 
such as Labour in Britain, the Socialists in France and the SPD in 
Germany, which abandoned rigid Marxist doctrines, alongside the new 
center-right movement of Christian Democracy, which rejected traditional 
nationalism, to take up the challenge. This was the hour of the welfare 
state, supported by social and Christian Democrats, which encouraged 
social solidarity within a democratic and capitalist framework.
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Despite this reality, linking socialism and Nazism to critique leftist 
ideas became a political weapon in the post-World War II period, perhaps 
unsurprisingly given that the Cold War followed directly on the heels of 
World War II. Scholars as diverse as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Hannah Arendt 
used the larger concept of “totalitarianism” to fuse the two. This formula 
made it easier for Americans to slip comfortably from considering the 
Soviet Union a wartime ally to recognizing it as an existential threat. 
Totalitarianism emphasized the structural similarities and violent 
practices of Nazi and Stalinist regimes.

This concept, however, proved controversial as an explanation of the 
origins or subsequent appeal of either communism or Nazism/fascism. 
Although Hitler and Stalin had cooperated in an effort to conquer Eastern 
Europe in 1939 to 1941, this was more a marriage of convenience than a 
byproduct of ideological synergy. Indeed, the two sides eventually fought 
a genocidal war against each other.

Austrian economist and future Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek added an 
extra layer to the conversation about socialism and Nazism with his 1943 
bestseller, “The Road to Serfdom.” As a staunch free marketeer, Hayek was 
appalled by the rise of economic planning in democratic states, embodied 
by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Hayek warned that any government 
intervention in the market eroded freedom, eventually leading to some form 
of dictatorship.
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Hayek was enormously influential across the globe within the rising 
conservative movement during the second half of the 20th century. He 
advised future leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and 
his book became foundational for the right. Hayek’s assertion that all 
government interventions in the economy led to totalitarianism continues 
to animate popular works such as D’Souza’s “The Big Lie,” reinforcing the 
idea that the welfare state is a gateway drug to genocide.

But while these ideas may make sense to free market purists, the history 
shows that it was the parties that arose in reaction to the Nazi horrors 
that built such welfare states. Denouncing their programs as “socialism” 
or warning of a tie between the two is nothing less than historical and 
political sophistry that attempts to turn effect into cause and victim 
into victimizer.

Historical analogies have a useful purpose to simplify and clarify, but 
they work best when used carefully. As manifest problems with global 
capitalism, as well as political gridlock, encourage a new hunger for 
fundamental political transformation, it is especially important that we 
understand the tragic decisions of the 1930s and their consequences in 
their full context, rather than simply transposing words from the past 
onto the debates of the present.
 

National Socialism preserved private property, while also putting the 
entire resources of society at the service of an expansionist and racist 
national vision, which included the conquest and murderous subjugation of 
other peoples. It makes no sense to think that the sole, or even the 
primary, negative aspect of this regime was the fact that it used state 
power to allocate financial resources. It makes as little sense to suggest 
that using state power to allocate some financial resources today will 
automatically result in the same dire consequences.

Historical “gotcha” threatens to reduce our political conversations to 
meaninglessness, and we should resist it. Debates over the proper role of 
the state in protecting citizens against the negative exigencies of the 
market are necessarily complex. Finding the proper balance of interests 
within a democratic political order depends on the measurement of results, 
not on the power of magic words to devalue competing ideas.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/05/right-needs-stop-
falsely-claiming-that-nazis-were-socialists/
  

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The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Rhys Gabbard <nowomr@protonmail.com> - 2023-10-01 16:04 +0000
  Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists � The Reverend <fformbysmythe@gmail.com> - 2023-10-01 17:37 +0100
  Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Jay Santos <js@cap.gov> - 2023-10-01 10:33 -0700
    Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Klaus  Schadenfreude <klaus.schadenfreude.Zwergent�ter.@gmail.com> - 2023-10-01 10:55 -0700
      Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists � The Reverend <fformbysmythe@gmail.com> - 2023-10-01 21:59 +0100
      Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Gronk <invalide@invalid.invalid> - 2023-10-06 23:10 -0600
        Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists % <peescent@qmail.net> - 2023-10-07 03:54 -0400
  Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@www.yahoo.com> - 2023-10-01 13:44 -0700
  Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Anonymous Reactionary <anonymous@internet.everywhere> - 2023-10-01 23:56 +0000
    Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Bruce Gerrard <nowomr@protonmail.com> - 2023-10-02 02:04 +0000
  Re: The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists Jay Santos <js@cap.gov> - 2023-10-15 17:44 -0700

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